Eco-Homesteaders

A young developer wants to bring New Urbanism to the Spokane Valley. But she needs everyone's help.

Cassie Price, left, and her father, Ross Taylor, walk their family property in Spokane Valley.

The land rises until the field becomes a hill. It rises until the trailers and split-levels lining its north end give way to the McMansions bordering its south. It rises away from the infrastructure of the Sprague/Appleway couplet until the roads become dirt and the communities become gated.

This is the land Cassie Price’s family homesteaded.

For nearly 100 years, her ancestors have owned various parcels of this ragged rectangle until, in 1991, all 195 acres came to belong to her father, Ross Taylor.

It is this land — the largest spit of dirt left in Spokane’s urban growth boundary — that Price and Taylor want to develop into a low-impact, mixed-use, cooperative-built, neighbor-focused, LEED-certified green community. It is land she and her father are in danger of losing altogether.

If things go to plan, in a little under a month, father and daughter will have raised the $2.5 million they need to shore up their debt and begin a project that they believe will create a neighborhood akin to Browne’s Addition or South Perry just off Park Road near the Dishman Hills Natural Area. If things go to plan, you — 26,000 of you, whoever you are — will have pitched in some cash.

If things do not go to plan, in a little under 45 days, Taylor’s lender will seize the property.

And while father and daughter talk about their last-ditch effort with the conviction of believers, both acknowledge that nothing has gone to plan in a long time.

At the turn of the century, the family’s land supported a pig farm, a dairy, a slaughterhouse, a rendering plant and an illicit still for moonshine in the woods above the valley floor. Price’s grandfather was born on this land in 1916. His parents were among the six original families that settled the area. Her grandmother and her great-grandparents came in 1928, from up the hill in Chester.

The land is still out of the way, but it’s also within the urban growth boundary. From here, it is only three minutes to Millwood and 11
minutes to downtown Spokane. Park Road already has a bike lane. “We
didn’t even have to ask for it,” Price says.

Taylor
says the neighbors are still friendly, the way they were when he was
growing up. It was a community back then. It ceased to be a community,
Taylor says, “when everything got cookie-cutter.”

The
man has, for decades, wanted this to be a community again. Price says
it wasn’t necessarily a green project that percolated in her father’s
mind all those years, but “he’d always envisioned a mixed-use village
sort of thing.” A development not just with houses and streets but with sidewalks and trails and a little stream with a bridge over it and
lots of common spaces. A development with a town center — restaurants,
cafes, offices — a place where people could live, work and play and not
need to drive. Price wants the buildings to have a net-zero energy
footprint, meaning they make as much energy — with solar power and
geothermal — as they use.

The
land here — the 195 acres owned by the Taylors and another 19 kicked in
by like-minded neighbors — can support 1,100 units of residential.
Price wants to cap it at 700, leaving the rest of the space for
commerce, recreation and gathering, open to anyone.

That’s the dream. Then there’s the reality.

In
November 2006, Taylor borrowed $2 million to get his dream off the
ground. He began plans for Phase One of construction, engineering and
infrastructure. By 2008, there were signs that the market was starting
to collapse. That spring, Taylor’s health started to go with it. He got
pneumonia in May, then suffered two pulmonary embolisms in July. “You’re
apparently not supposed to survive those,” Price says.

He
signed over power of attorney to his daughter, but her focus for the
next few months was caring for him. They were paying $20,000 a month in
interest on the loan, and when her attention turned back to the project,
she realized the money that was supposed to get them through building
infrastructure wasn’t even enough to start.

And
it isn’t true to say the land is pure upside. There’s basically nothing
around it. The closest grocery store is two miles away, if you count
Costco as a grocery store. The closest coffee shop is a mile. The
closest place to buy a book is a porn shop that probably doesn’t stock Little Women. The closest bank is a Citibank ATM.

But
that’s their main reason for wanting to create a town center. Taylor
and Price want to draw people to their community whether those people
live in it or not. But that might be a problem. Jim Frank of Greenstone
Homes worries, without having specific knowledge of Taylor’s plans, that
the area around the development doesn’t have the density to support a
lot of retail. Regardless of how utopian and beautiful the plan, he
says, “You still have to use the normal principles of retail
development.” That means several thousand households within a mile
radius of a grocery store, for example.

Proponents
of New Urbanism — which values walkable, compact, mixed-use development —
say that you can get by with lower density in areas where people are
committed to driving, which people in the Valley certainly are. Wal-
Marts in the Dakotas draw people from 100 miles away. Taylor and Price
just need to draw them from five or 10, where there are 70,000 and
140,000 households, respectively.

Price thinks that’s not
unreasonable. She thinks their land can become a magnet for folks in
Opportunity and Millwood and maybe even Greenacres and Lincoln Heights.

“There are a lot of people hungry for community,” she says.

For
four years, people have been telling Taylor and Price that their dream
is a good dream, if it wasn’t for the reality of things.

A
market analysis conducted by RCLCO, a national firm that advises on
real estate and development, rated the project an “A-” overall, saying
that a “master-planned community that follows the theme of
sustainability” would do exceedingly well at the price points that Price
and her father have worked out. It rated the project favorably against
all other comparable projects in Spokane and the Valley, including
Greenstone Homes’ River District development.

Greater
Spokane Incorporated issued a report last week saying that the Taylor
project would create jobs in the area’s green sector. The chamber of
commerce estimates the housing aspect of the project alone will bring
nearly $180 million in economic activity. The mixed-use and retail side
of the plan — which is years off — would add close to another $2
million, along with 25 new jobs and over $500,000 in salaries.

Local green builders and architects are excited about it, too.

While
the location worries him, Jim Frank says the commitment to building
common space is a smart one. People have begun to see the value of
sacrificing a little private space for greater public space, and the
people who like the idea — Generation Y and retirees — are the
fastest-growing segments of the housing market. “You don’t walk your dog
in your yard, you walk your dog on the trail with your neighbor,” Frank
says, “It’s not for everybody, but a lot of people like that value
proposition.”

Gavin
Tenold, the owner of Pura Vida Homes, a sustainable builder, says, “I’m
excited to see someone step up to the plate and attempt to use energy
efficiency in the development model rather than just the construction
side of things.” He says he’s not worried about a project like that
taking off in this economic climate. He started Pura Vida just as
everything went to hell. Tenold says it has grown “completely because we
offer energy efficiency.”

Everyone
who needs to believe in Taylor and Price’s project for it to succeed
already believes in it. Everyone except the money people.

The
list of people Price has approached to invest since 2008 runs on for
three pages. “[I’ve talked to] brokers, banks, investment bankers,
people on the Forbes [100] list,” she says, “I’ve written letters to
Brad Pitt. ... I can’t believe he never got back to me.” Most of them
say the same thing, she says. “It’s, ‘Cool project, too bad it’s right
now. Wait five years.’” But Price and her father don’t have five years.
When people say no, they say it “like they know I’m going to lose [the
land] and any other thoughts are delusional,” Price says.

After
all this, Price believes her last shot to save the family homestead is
you. This week, started a funding drive on IndieGoGo, a crowdsourcing site like the
ultra-popular Kickstarter. She is looking for $2.6 million dollars (the
$2.5 million she needs plus the $100,000 the site will take as
commission). Representatives for IndieGoGo have told her that the
average donation she should expect is $100, which means she’s looking
for 26,000 backers.

The
conventional wisdom of crowd-sourcing is that 1 percent of everyone who
sees your campaign will donate to it, which means Price needs to get
2.6 million sets of eyes on it.

Under
normal circumstances, Price says, it’s not a good idea for developers
to talk publicly about their problems. So much of getting financing is
about lender confidence. She has already been turned down by everybody,
though. There’s no one left to say no.

And so, although crowd-sourcing a housing development is not a traditional path, it feels like the only one left to her.

“Honestly,” she says, “it seems easier to get $100 from 26,000 people right now than to get 2.5 million from a single bank.”